Gerda Taro

Gerda Taro
Taro in Spain, July 1937
Born	Gerta Pohorylle (1910-08-01)1 August 1910 Stuttgart
Died	26 July 1937(1937-07-26) (aged 26) Brunete, Madrid, Spanish Republic
Resting place	Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Paris, France
Occupation	Photojournalist
Years active	1935–1937
Employer	Alliance Photo
Partner	Robert Capa (1935–1937)

Gerta Pohorylle (1 August 1910 – 26 July 1937), known professionally as Gerda Taro, was a Jewish war photographer active during the Spanish Civil War. She is regarded as the first woman photojournalist to have died while covering the frontline in a war.

Taro was the companion and professional partner of photographer Robert Capa. The name "Robert Capa" was originally an alias that Taro and Capa (born Endre Friedmann) shared, an invention meant to mitigate the increasing political intolerance in Europe and to attract the lucrative American market. A significant amount of what is credited as Robert Capa's early work was actually made by Taro.

Early life

Pohorylle was born on 1 August 1910 in Stuttgart into a middle-class Jewish family that had recently emigrated from East Galicia. There she attended the Queen Charlotte High School (de) and later a business college, spending a year at a Lausanne boarding school in between.

In 1929, the family moved to Leipzig, just prior to the rise of Nazi Germany. Taro opposed the National Socialist German Workers Party and became interested in Leftist politics. In 1933, following the Nazi party's coming to power, she was arrested and detained for distributing propaganda against the National Socialists. Eventually, the entire Pohorylle household was forced to leave Germany toward different destinations. Taro, age 23, headed for Paris, while her parents attempted to reach mandatory Palestine (also known as Eretz Yisrael at that time by Jews seeking to reestablish a safe homeland). Her brothers went to England. She would not see her family again.

France

Pohorylle moved to Paris in 1934 to escape the anti-Semitism of Hitler's Germany. There she met the photojournalist Endre Friedmann, a Hungarian Jew, learned photography and became his personal assistant. They fell in love. Pohorylle began to work for Alliance Photo as a picture editor.

In 1936, Pohorylle received her first photojournalist credential. Then, she and Friedmann devised a plan where Friedmann claimed to be the agent of photographer Robert Capa, a name they invented. Both took news photographs and sold them as the work of the non-existent American photographer Robert Capa; this was a convenient name overcoming the increasing political intolerance prevailing in Europe and attractive for the lucrative American market. Capa was derived from Friedmann's Budapest street nickname "Cápa" which means "Shark" in Hungarian. The secret did not last long, but Friedmann kept the more commercial name "Capa" for his own name, while Pohorylle adopted the professional name of "Gerda Taro" after the Japanese artist Tarō Okamoto and Swedish actress Greta Garbo. The two worked together to cover the events surrounding the coming-to-power of the Popular Front in 1930s France.

Spanish Civil War

A 1937 photograph by Taro of Republican soldiers at the Navacerrada Pass in Spain

A 1936 photograph by Taro showing a woman training for a Republican militia

When the Spanish Civil War broke out (1936), Taro travelled to Barcelona, Spain, to cover the events with Capa and David "Chim" Seymour. Taro acquired the nickname of La pequeña rubia ("The little blonde"). They covered the war together in northeastern Aragon and in the southern Córdoba province. Always together under the common and using the bogus signature of Robert Capa, they succeeded in publishing through important publications (the Swiss Zürcher Illustrierte, the French Vu). Their early war photographs are distinguishable since Taro used a Rollei camera which rendered squared photographs while Capa produced rectangular pictures using a Leica camera. However, for some time in 1937 they each produced similar 35 mm pictures under the label of Capa&Taro.

Subsequently, Taro attained some independence. She refused Capa's marriage proposal. Also, she became publicly related to the circle of anti-fascist European and intellectuals (such as Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell) who crusaded particularly for the Spanish Republic. fr:Ce Soir, a communist newspaper of France, signed her for publishing Taro's works only. Then, she began to commercialise her production under the Photo Taro label. Regards, Life, Illustrated London News and Volks-Illustrierte (the exile edition of Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung) were amongst the publications that used her work.

Reporting the Valencia bombing alone, Taro obtained the photographs which are her most celebrated. Also, in July 1937, Taro's photographs were in demand by the international press when, alone, she was covering the Brunete region near Madrid for Ce Soir. Although the Nationalist propaganda claimed that the region was under its control, the Republican forces had in fact forced that faction out. Taro's photographs were the only testimony of the actual situation.

Death

During her coverage of the Republican army retreat at the Battle of Brunete, Taro hopped onto the footboard of a car that was carrying wounded soldiers. A Republican tank crashed into its side and Taro suffered critical wounds, dying the following day, 26 July 1937.

The circumstances of Taro's death have been questioned by British journalist Robin Stummer, writing in the New Statesman magazine. Stummer cited Willy Brandt, later Chancellor of West Germany, and a friend of Taro's during the Spanish Civil War, saying that she had been the victim of the Stalinist purge of Communists and Socialists in Spain not aligned to Moscow. However, Stummer provided no other evidence for this claim.

In an interview with the Spanish daily El País, a nephew of a Republican soldier at the Battle of Brunete explained that she had died in an accident. According to the eye-witness account, she had been run over by a reversing tank and she died from her wounds in El Goloso English hospital a few hours later. The tank driver did not realize what he had done.

Due to her political commitment, Taro had become a respected anti-fascist figure. On 1 August 1937, on what would have been her 27th birthday, the French Communist Party gave her a grand funeral in Paris, drawing tens of thousands of people on to the streets, buried her at Père Lachaise Cemetery, and commissioned Alberto Giacometti to create a monument for her grave.

In early 2018, a photograph purported to be an image of Taro on her deathbed in the English war hospital was released by the son of Hungarian Dr. Kiszely who treated her.

Legacy

Taro's grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery. Designed by Alberto Giacometti, it features the falcon Horus, and the epitaph "So nobody will forget your unconditional struggle for a better world" (in French and Catalan)

On 26 September 2007, the International Center of Photography opened the first major U.S. exhibition of Taro's photographs.

In the summer of 2016 an open-air display of Taro's Spanish Civil War photographs was part of the f/stop photography festival in Leipzig. When the festival ended, it was decided the display, partly paid for by crowdfunding, would become permanent. Shortly after, on 4 August, the display of Taro's work was destroyed by smearing it with black paint. With a crowdfunding project to restore the work ongoing, the destroyed work remains in place. It is suspected the destruction is motivated by anti-refugee or anti-semitic sentiments.

The novel Waiting for Robert Capa, by Susana Fortes (2011 – English translation by Adriana V. López), is a fictionalized account of the life of Taro and Capa.

The documentary film, The Mexican Suitcase (2011), tells the story of a suitcase of 4,500 lost negatives taken by Taro, Capa, and David Seymour during the Spanish Civil War. The suitcase, and the negatives, are currently housed at the International Center of Photography in New York City. The stage play Shooting With Light, produced by theater company Idle Motion, is based on this film.

The British indie rock band alt-J released the song entitled "Taro" in reference to Gerda Taro and her role as a war photographer during the Spanish Civil War as well as her relationship to Capa. The song describes the graphic details of Capa's death ("A violent wrench grips mass / Rips light, tears limbs like rags") and imagines Taro's complementary emotions.

In 2018, the city of Leipzig in Germany named a newly built gymnasium for 1,200 students after Taro.

She was highlighted on Google's Doodle on August 1, 2018.

Publications

• Capa, Robert (1938), Death in the Making, New York: Covici Friede, Photographs by Taro and Capa

Further reading

• Schaber, Irme (1994), Gerta Taro: Fotoreporterin im spanischen Bürgerkrieg: eine Biografie [Gerda Taro: photojournalist in the Spanish Civil War: a biography] (in German), Marburg: Jonas, ISBN 978-3-89445-175-2
• Olmeda, Fernando [in Spanish] (2007), Gerda Taro, fotógrafa de guerra: el periodismo como testigo de la historia [Gerda Taro, war photographer: journalism as a witness to history] (in Spanish), Barcelona: Editorial Debate, ISBN 978-84-8306-702-4
• Schaber, Irme (2007), Gerta Taro, Steidl, ISBN 978-3865215321
• Maspero, François  (2008), Out of the Shadows: A Life of Gerda Taro, Souvenir, ISBN 978-0285638259{{citation}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
• Arroyo, Lorna (2011). Documentalismo técnico en la Guerra Civil española. Inicios del fotoperiodismo moderno en relación a la obra de Gerda Taro [Technical documentation in the Spanish Civil War. Beginnings of modern photojournalism in relation to the work of Gerda Taro] (PhD) (in Spanish). Castellón: Universidad Jaime I.
• Rogoyska, Jane (2013), Gerda Taro – Inventing Robert Capa, London: Jonathan Cape, ISBN 978-0224097130

External links

• "International Center of Photography Holds First Major Exhibition of Taro's Work", The New York Times, 22 September 2007.
• "Exhibition – Gerda Taro – This is War exhibition at the Barbican", Magnum Photos, 2008.